Women contribute important insights in agricultural research. Whether as government researchers, university professors, or senior research managers, their skills and perspectives are essential for addressing the unique and pressing challenges of all farmers, particularly female farmers. In addition, recruiting from only male candidate pools hampers efforts by African agricultural research agencies to hire the best candidates, regardless of sex.

These are a few of many good reasons why African countries should ensure that women are well represented among their agricultural researchers.

The number of women researchers rose in both absolute and relative terms between 2008 and 2014—and in 2014, an average of 24 percent of full time equivalent researchers in a sample of 40 African countries were female.

Obviously there is much more progress to be made. An in-depth look at the data reveals that representation varies widely between countries, and women tend to be in less senior positions.

What obstacles are women agricultural researchers facing? What can help overcome them? ASTI’s gender-specific data provides an illustration, but much more information is needed to answer these questions. Success for African farmers—both male and female—depends on it.

ASTI’s latest data collection and analysis from Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) exposes a persistent problem and a drag on sustainable development efforts: Growth in research spending is lower than for other kinds of agricultural investment.

Why is this happening, and can anything be done to reverse this imbalance?

Under the 2003 Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), countries committed to spend at least 10 percent of their budgets on agriculture, with the goal of achieving 6 percent annual growth in their agricultural sectors. In 2014 in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, heads of state reaffirmed their support and confirmed that additional investment was needed to meet this target.

The good news is that substantial progress has been made towards these goals.

After a long period of neglect, SSA governments on average more than doubled their investments in inflation-adjusted terms during 2000-2014. Many SSA countries ramped up investments in areas such as farm support and subsidies, training, irrigation, and extension. However, growth in agricultural research investments fell behind.

There is well-documented evidence that agricultural research investments in SSA offer high returns compared with investments in other agricultural inputs. So why aren’t African countries investing more in an area that would both benefit their economies, and help them reach their CAADP growth targets?

Lag time. The returns to investment in agricultural research are substantial, but are realized in the longer-term. Policy makers have more incentive to steer investments towards areas where they can show constituents results within the time frame of their terms of office.

Farmers lack political clout. Though they are the main beneficiaries of agricultural research, farmers are not in an ideal situation to advocate for increased spending. Although smallholder farmers constitute a significant share of Africa’s population, they are widely dispersed. Many also lack the social, economic, and educational resources to engage in collective action to effect policy change.

Donors rank other goals higher. Since the 1990s, donor priorities have focused on structural adjustment reform and privatizing public activities, which diverted funding from agricultural research.

Government research budgets focus on the short-term. A country’s budget process itself can be a barrier to the funding of agricultural research agencies. Rather than determining budgets based on a thorough assessment of a country’s long-term research needs, governments often allocate funds on a fixed, incremental schedule.

So what can be done? Raising awareness of these political roadblocks is the first step. Another task for policy makers and research agency leaders is to diversify their funding sources, to avoid over-reliance on donors. Some research agencies, for example, have been able to raise funds from the sale of goods and services, taxes on commodities, or private sector investment. These sources will differ by country, but the importance of including research in the agricultural investment mix holds true for all countries in SSA, especially as they strive to reduce poverty and hunger through their CAADP investment commitments.

See more findings and analysis of research investments in SSA in the full report.

This new report—and related data and analysis—finds that, although SSA countries have made progress honoring regionwide commitments to agricultural support such as outlined in the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), growth in agricultural research investments has lagged considerably behind spending on other agricultural areas, such as farm support, subsidies, and irrigation.

The data cover key indicators on agricultural research investments, human resource capacity, and research outputs in the region. The report highlights various challenges:

Agricultural research spending and human resource capacity both grew in SSA as a whole during 2000–2014, but results were uneven.

Underinvestment in agricultural research continued and many countries remained dependent on volatile donor funding.

In a large number of countries, a high proportion of agricultural researchers qualified to the PhD-level is approaching retirement age. This, combined with high shares of more recently recruited junior staff, could result in significant knowledge gaps and jeopardize future research outputs.

Outdated research facilities and equipment are impeding the conduct of productive research.

Taking into account these challenges, the report outlines a number of policy implications for SSA governments.

ASTI analysis has also resulted in new national spending targets for agricultural research, based on characteristics of each country’s economy and agricultural sector. The report finds that certain countries are close to their attainable investment levels, while others have the potential to invest much more.

India is expected to be the world’s most populous country in six short years. Is its agriculture sector prepared to feed its growing population?

More than 40 management-level researchers and university representatives from various parts of India gathered last month to discuss what the latest ASTI data reveals.

The event, which took place August 17 in New Delhi, presented data on agricultural research spending, human capacity, and outputs based on results from a survey ASTI conducted in collaboration with the National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM).

Photo: Arsheen Kaur

PK Joshi from IFPRI’s New Delhi Office, Ganesh Kumar and Kalpana Sastry from NAARM, and Gert-Jan Stads from ASTI set the stage and shared results, while experts from the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), the Agricultural Economics Research Association (AERA), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), and others offered insights on key issues and challenges.

The data offer a lot of good news: India has one of the best-staffed agricultural research and development systems in the world with three quarters of its 12,750 government agency and university-based researchers holding PhD degrees. After a gradual decline in the first decade of the 2000s, the establishment of new universities and colleges has led to a rebound in research capacity in more recent years.

Despite these positive trends, however, challenges remain. In 2014, India invested just 0.30 percent of its AgGDP in agricultural research. The government’s current goal to spend at least 1 percent of its agricultural GDP on research and education by 2017 appears unrealistic. Recent increases in agricultural research spending were largely driven by rising salary costs, rather than costs supporting actual research programs and infrastructure. There is also a strong gender imbalance among agricultural researchers, with women making up only 18 percent of agricultural researchers and being largely absent in management positions.

India’s private sector has an important role to play in agricultural research and development— in 2009, for example, it supplied an estimated 20 percent of the country’s agricultural research spending. But much remains unknown about sector’s impact on food security, poverty, and other development goals. Speakers agreed that accurate and timely data on private sector spending in India’s agricultural research is critically needed.

According to a report released by NAARM, agriculture is the most important sector of the Indian economy – a source of employment for more than half the workforce and of income for rural Indians who make up the vast majority of the population. India’s remarkable transformation from a net importer to a net exporter of staple food has happened largely thanks to research that produced new technologies for increased productivity.

The ASTI data presented in New Delhi makes the case for continuing this research, with policy support and funding, to feed this growing nation’s people.

ASTI officially launched its new agricultural research and development indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean at a roundtable event at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on Wednesday April 27.

Pedro Martel, division chief of the IDB’s Environment, Rural Development Disaster Risk Management division offered welcoming remarks and Cesar Falconi, principal economist in the same division and a key supporter of the project, gave opening and closing words, and encouraged the lively and open discussion.

The new data tell a positive story of the region, with both agricultural research spending and number of researchers increasing dramatically (at 37 and 20 percent, respectively) since 2006.

However, ASTI presenters emphasized that the picture was not rosy for every country. Many Central American countries, Caribbean island nations, and poorer Andean countries are increasingly falling behind in terms of infrastructure, investment levels, and capacity, while an aging pool of scientists— particularly those with PhD training—raises concerns about future knowledge gaps.

Nin-Pratt noted that many of the factors that led to a “perfect storm” of high agricultural productivity in the region in recent years—high commodity prices, favorable policy changes, new technologies, and private sector investment—will not be sufficient to sustain this production in the future. “Future growth will depend on efficient innovation systems,” he said.

As Beintema concluded, “Given the critical role of agricultural research in addressing climate change, persistent rural poverty, and other challenges, stable and sustainable levels of funding are key.”

TheAgricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI)website is home to a new feature. ASTI has extracted the most relevant and consistent data from CGIAR centers’ annual reports to make it more accessible for reporting and analysis for those interested in the CGIAR’s financial and staffing evolution.

Detailed information on staffing, funding, and expenditures of individual CGIAR centers and the CGIAR system as a whole are now available in a series of interactive graphs and data downloads, providing visual insights into the evolution of the CGIAR system. This information was previously only available online in the PDF versions of the CGIAR annual financial reports.

ASTI supports the current CGIAR Open Access and Data Management Policy, which was established and adopted in November 2013, falling in line with scaling up good practice of making the current data more easily available. The CGIAR datasets will be maintained and updated by ASTI depending on funding availability.

Full time-series dataset available for Sub-Saharan African countries
ASTI is pleased to announce that all available data for its recent Sub-Saharan Africa survey round are now ready to download from the ASTI Data Tool. The new data cover 31 countries over the period 2001–08, and include indicators such as research staff levels and public expenditures on agricultural R&D.

ASTI Country Pages provide a wealth of agricultural R&D information
ASTI has compiled country-specific data, publications, links, and additional resources on its country webpages. Simply select a country from the list on the ASTI website to access.

The newly released ASTI country note states that, overall, public agricultural R&D expenditures in Senegal have fallen gradually due to reduced donor support and cuts in government funding. [Read more...]